When I was a child growing up on the South Side of Chicago, my family would drive downtown
across 76th Street, get on Lake Shore Drive around the University of Chicago and sweep from there
into the ever-famous Loop. It was a sight that never bored us.

In the kind months, when Lake Michigan was all shades of blue, Chicagoans could not get enough
of the lake’s wonders. We thought our city was beautiful — but I have to say that in those years,
even at its best, it was a tough, gritty, gray city of steel mills, Mafia hit men and a river that
we had somehow made run backward.

It had none of the extraordinary beauty that Chicago boasts of today, with brightly colored
flowers and trees everywhere, with glass buildings that outshine the sun, and a “Magnificent Mile”
on North Michigan Avenue that just may be the most enticing mile in American cities today.

It’s a pretty picture, but something has gone terribly wrong.

When I was growing up there, we lived on West 83rd Street, which is important because it was
deep into the city, most of whose white neighborhoods were middle-class/working-class like ours. We
all lived in those little bungalows that dominated these neighborhoods. Most of us went to city
high schools and some to the Catholic schools. We had lovely parks and tennis courts. The small,
but substantial, number of African-American middle-class families had the same.

And today? The Chicago papers say that 85 percent of the children in those same public schools
and in our former bungalows live under the poverty level. Nearly 80 percent of black children are
illegitimate — and most, fatherless. But those figures give us only the base for the really
frightening things happening in the city that is being called this summer the “Murder Capital of
America.”

In the first six months of 2012, more than 250 murders were recorded in my hometown, compared
with 193 murders in New York City, which is three times as large as Chicago. On Memorial Day
weekend, when Americans are supposed to be commemorating the sacrifices in war of American
soldiers, more than 40 people were shot and 10 of them died.

Most of the deaths — and most of the mobs of teenage boys that suddenly appear out of nowhere —
are in the poorer neighborhoods. But there also are attacks on State Street and Michigan Avenue,
where a doctor based in one of the Near North Side hospitals was recently badly beaten on his way
home. Often in these attacks, nothing is taken, illustrating a desire simply to hurt people.

In Englewood, the 20-by-20-block working-class neighborhood just to the north of the Foster Park
neighborhood where we lived until 1965, homicides increased from 40 in 2010 to 60 last year, which
the Associated Press reports is more than half the total number of 2011 homicides for cities such
as Cleveland, Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., Oakland and Kansas City.

The Chicago victims include everyone from little children of 6 and 7, to a paraplegic sitting on
his stoop, to, of course, more and more police officers, as well as members of formerly well-known
gangs, which have now splintered into smaller gangs.

Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring, a specialist on crime and violence, was quoted in The
Daily Beast, in the present fest of attempts to analyze what is going on in the Windy City:

“Until this spring, Chicago looked quite typical of all the national crime trends, including its
neighbor, New York. But that’s been interrupted, and it’s been interrupted big time. The police say
it’s gangs. That’s both helpful and extremely mysterious. Because there is no sense that Chicago
has a gang profile which is vastly different from that of Los Angeles, and yet (the murder rate in)
Los Angeles has continued (to be) low.”

Responsible people in Chicago, from new Mayor Rahm Emanuel to police and crime specialists, all
point to the fact that gangs in Chicago have changed over the years. They are no longer the small
group of well-established bands, but rather have now broken down into hundreds of tinier groups
with alliances so difficult to pinpoint that they are impossible to classify.

In contrast to my years growing up, behind that beautiful montage are neighborhoods that look
like ours (in fact, they have the same bungalows) but are not the same. Those houses are, for the
most part, not real family homes — there are no fathers, and fewer and fewer married mothers.

Solve that, and find out where the plethora of guns is coming from, and train more women to say
no to unmarried sex and more men to say yes to fatherhood — and you’ll solve the murder
problem.

There are gutsy groups, the main one in Chicago being CeaseFire, that are working on these
problems right in those very neighborhoods. Yet one wonders whether what’s happening in Chicago
this summer is not a warning about what America is becoming: a country without enough jobs, without
enough policing and without the internalized morality that fatherhood can give to young males. Let’s
hope for some answers.